THE WORLD IS A MIRROR OF MYSELF DYING

In the late 1970’s Currado Malaspina initiated an unlikely friendship with Henry Miller that lasted until the great writer’s death. Miller showed the young Malaspina great tenderness and took a keen interest in his work. A few of his early monotypes remain in the Miller estate and are only made available to researchers and scholars.

A few weeks ago Currado shared a few reminiscences with me while we had a wonderful lunch of rein et foie de veau at Bateau Calife on Quai Malaquais:

“’The whores of Montmartre were as cute as buttonholes’, Miller would exhale when the ravishing mists of memory would claw him away from his middle-class present. Seized by an irresistible urge to prevaricate, Miller’s eloquence was most gripping the more ignoble the myth. In a voice as raspy as a tailpipe he would rattle off names like Durrell and Cendrars and recount with excruciating detail episodes of inspired dissipation. To Henri, life was a book and the only pretext to living was to find something to write about.”

I’m not so sure I trust Currado’s account.

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF CURRADO MALASPINA

"Desire," Currado wrote to me in a letter dated March 21st, 1993, "is both blind and brief and I'd best vanquish this impulse early and decisively."

The graceful dignity in Currado Malaspina's youthful correspondences shows a young man struggling with a tempestuous spirit. Calming what were then unutterable impulses took a heroic and ultimately hopeless discipline of self-denial. He taught himself a soft, perfect pitch in which to frame the daily crucible of his deferred raptures.


Malaspina continues to be a devoted epistolarian and his collected letters are soon to be published by Caillot Press. Clotted with vivid imagery, artful prose and philosophical insight, rarely has such a painful document of moral frailty been such a pleasure to read. Lustily illuminated with casual pen and ink jottings, this new volume will add much to the already rich catalog of Malaspina's oeuvre.